Why not offer girls the same opportunities that are offered to their male colleagues to play at a high level?” “If we look around, the growth of women’s football is evident.
“This opportunity presented itself to us to make the leap, and when an opportunity presents itself it must be seized,” said Krause.
Parma’s women, though, were due to play in Serie C in the new campaign, having won promotion from Serie D last time around, but Krause displayed his ambition for them again when he purchased Empoli’s Serie A licence this summer, meaning Parma now take their place in the top flight, with Empoli choosing to turn its focus to youth football.
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This season will see the women’s Serie A go professional for the first time with the old salary cap of €30,000 now removed, allowing clubs to offer more attractive wages and ultimately compete for the signing of the game’s bigger names who, until now, have been drawn largely to England, France, Germany and Spain. And then one day I got a text from my agent saying he was chatting to Parma – and it just went from there.” I always wanted to go somewhere with a different language, a different culture, to gain experience both on and off the pitch. “I loved my time there, the club was very good to me, but I just kind of had itchy feet, I decided I’d like to challenge myself elsewhere. It was towards the end of last season that Farrelly, after 18 months in Glasgow, decided she wanted to move on. Niamh Farrelly: 'It’s an exciting time to be coming to Italy with the league going professional and Parma in Serie A, it’s a brilliant challenge for me' We have great facilities, we get what the men get, there’s real ambition here. He wants the same in Italy and is making sure the club is getting behind the women’s team. “He talked about how he looks at it from an American perspective where women’s football is so big and so successful. Krause, meanwhile, was vowing to rebuild Parma after a calamitous few years that saw the club go bankrupt and the men’s team drop down to Serie D.Īs a member of the family that owns the Kum & Go chain of petrol stations and convenience stores in America’s midwest, he wasn’t short of loot, and unusually enough for an owner of an Italian club at the time, was intent on investing in the women’s side of the operation too.Ĭome this summer, Farrelly found herself a beneficiary of that ambition, hearing about it first hand when she and her new Parma team-mates had dinner with Krause in Val di Pejo, in the mountains of northern Italy, where the squad were preparing for the new season. If Niamh Farrelly even heard the news about American billionaire Kyle Krause buying a 90 per cent stake in Italian club Parma back towards the tail end of 2020, she’d have been forgiven for doubting that this development would ever have any impact on her own particular life.Īt the time, she was busy helping Peamount United win the National League, a few months before signing her first professional contract with Glasgow City.
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